Tonight, on the “we’re in Chicago again” edition of the With Leather WWE Raw open discussion thread:

Triple H cemented his legacy as a WWE Superstar by taking on some of the toughest competitors of all time, including The Undertaker. There’s no doubt he’s WWE Hall of Fame-bound. But now The Cerebral Assassin is looking to make a name for himself in another arena — the boardroom of a billion dollar public company. However, some of WWE’s Superstars aren’t taking too well to his management style. Here are five reasons to catch tonight’s Raw at 8/7 CT on USA Network. (via WWE.com)

Our five-point preview:

1. WE’RE IN BIZARRO LAND, KING, HUH HUH! Tonight’s Raw is from Chicago, so be sure to go back and read about the last Chicago episode. It featured anger management therapy, John Cena being more important than CM Punk, Jack Swagger leaving for Mars and a Heath Slater vs. Zack Ryder match. So … not much has changed!

2. COO Triple H may have to “quell a rebellion,” assuming you think “The Prime Time Players and Justin Gabriel aren’t doing exactly what I told them to do once in the last two months” is a rebellion. Look for The Shield to wrestle 9 3-on-1 matches in one night.

3. Natalya and Curtis Axel should have a long conversation with one another while holding microphones so I can laugh and clap my hands.

4. The Rob Van Dam vs. Alberto Del Rio feud continues, with Triple H giving RVD a second chance at Del Rio’s title at Battleground. My theory: they overpaid for Ricardo’s airbrushed t-shirt and want to make sure they’re getting their money’s worth.

5. Tonight, DAVID OTUNGA RETURNS. I’m not basing that on anything, I’m just hoping David Otunga returns tonight and should start using my weird Firestarter WWE booking powers for good. Otunga shows up tonight, gets involved a story we wouldn’t expect him to be involved in and … maybe loses to Daniel Bryan, or whoever.

As always, +1 replies will put your favorite comments from tonight’s open discussion thread into Top 10 consideration for tomorrow’s Best and Worst of Raw column. Give them out liberally, like Aiden English, and not conservatively, like Zeb Colter.

I know I’m way late to the party as far as Raw goes, but I just had my first real “spit liquid out of my mouth because something is so funny” moment of my life when Stephanie suggested that Zack Ryder could be the face of the company. I need to clean my laptop screen, but I can’t stop laughing.

I’m just curious how you would have felt about this main event if John Cena was ending the night doing his “You can’t see me” taunt instead of Bryan “Yesing.” I’m fine with catharsis, but I’m not really a fan of how this was booked.

I’ve got to disagree with the folks who are saying the Shield were made to be underdogs. I think the faces getting some payback was fun, and, yeah, there were 11 of them. They SHOULD beat the Shield, and it certainly didn’t take away from the legitimacy of the Shield because, again, it took 11 guys to beat them.

Fun main event for a relatively decent show. The Punk stuff was a little strange, and it took him a long, long time to get to his point, but until Heyman interrupted it sounded like a house show promo.

Bah, a month ago everyone was pissed off because the heels were winning every week, now the faces get to be stacked for a change and everyone gets all “WAH CONTINUITY AND UNUSUAL ALIGNMENT SITUATIONS.” In the immortal words of Mitch Hedberg, “You can’t please all the people all the time, and last night, all of those people were at my show.”

It’s too obvious if it was a Shield as a Sacrifice match. And why not make it a more fair match? How many of those guys had been threatened by the Shield recently? I dunno, man. It just felt weird and I couldn’t get behind the win anymore than if the Shield had beaten Zack Ryder on his own.

I agree it felt sort of odd; but I don’t think it’s anything to really be bothered by. I mean, yeah, Ryder, Gabriel, and Truth are about as much a threat to the Administration as you or I would be. But if it had only been four or five people rebelling, HHH could just say “Fuck you, you’re all fired.” But when it’s *ten* people, he has to do something to pacify them.

So that’s why they had to include lower-card people. And I honestly don’t see any other reason for it than as a sacrifice match. Sometimes they just need to fill three hours of programming.

I mean, is that really the ending? This seemed like such an odd, kind of book by the numbers Raw. Tag matches, check. Del Rio vs Kingston, check. Faces beat Shield, check. It was just so safe and….boring.

I wanted to enjoy the Punk thing but the sports analogies and weird logic of, “I don’t deserve to wrestle anymore because I was ambushed by a guy who outweighs my by a hundred lbs in muscle” didn’t really work for me.

I did like Orton killing RVD though, and that made me kinda glad they voted for him over Ziggler.

Black Tooth… I’m not trolling. You’re responses are so fucking lazy, I mean honestly. “You’re wrong and you’re a troll.” I can’t even argue with you because you don’t even bother to defend or put a position on why you like something. I’m not trolling, I’m giving legitimate reasons for my opinions. Dickhead.

@Sebastian Victims of abuse often feel like they are to blame for the actions of others, or for not being able to prevent the actions that have happened to them, and feel guilt for letting down others. He is having delayed trauma of the event if you want to get totally kayfabe about it all, It was a traumatic event that has happened to him and it has screwed him up a little bit, he knows he is not to blame and should not “retire” but he knows deep down he was not responsble for it. If you want to go deep into it that is.

And look, to the comment earlier, there’s a difference between character motivation and Hulk Hogan throwing out all belivablity in a match because he magically got pumped up. I think Hogan could get away with it because it was the 80s and he was Hulk Hogan, but to make a good story you need actual characters with realistic motivations….Punk’s usually very consistent with his character and his promos but here he said he felt he didn’t deserve to wrestle… which doesn’t make any damn sense because he was ambushed by a guy who’s about ten times as strong as him after he had already wrestled a match. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

@ Lemon, yeah, if you want to go into deep psychological issues
that makes sense…. I guess. But its the fact that he was thinking about just stopping wrestling in general until the crowd cheered him up, or so he said.

I mean, that makes sense, and I ran that through my head, but it just seems…. I don’t know… argh, I don’t wanna get ran over by the Black Tooth guy. I guess what I’m trying to say is, it just didn’t come across like that to me, it felt more like Punk was logically saying it was his fault for not getting Heyman and he let the fans down. It makes sense from that point of view but at the same time Punk’s been through so much trauma and other shit as a wrestler I don’t think it would really effect him to get SUDDENLY ATTACKED! I’m usually better at these types of things but I’m kinda sick lately so I’m just going to hope I expressed myself well enough here.

No you were grand mate, wwe definitely does not go that psychological in their storylines anywhere remotely close to that, and if they did try they would make it so OBVIOUS that they were doing that. Nothing wrong with what you said, just looking into it too deeply, nothing wrong with that, but faces say bullshit all the time just to say that stuff. He has been consistent, but people phone it in sometimes and with Chicago he would be cheered no matter what.

After mulling it over in my OCDic, Panic Attack brain that makes perfect sense. Its just that, it feels like you can use a lot of mental conditions, or mental problems for characters to get away without doing the groundwork. But I suppose that explanation does make the most sense, even though he’s logically wrong he still feels psychologically compelled to think that its his fault even though, logically it isn’t.

Well thanks for agreeing with me, I was just thinking over the promo and him saying stuff like, “I let you down,” I mean you kind of knew he was full of shit and the trauma theory would work best there.

Or he could just be trying to say something other than, “Heyman, I want to fuck you up,” again.

Well, as I said, I don’t think it’s meant to be that deep, wrestling always has (mostly) been a lazy game, it isn’t that consistent, a lot of it makes people go “puh-lease” and they look down their nose on it, cause of a lot of the promo’s “I was ashamed to show my face in front of you fans”, “I love each and every one of you”, etc.

That’s what abuse is. All abuse is psychological abuse if you look at it simply and take away all the bullshit it hides behind, and the bully (in this case Heyman + Ryback) does it for so long that it makes Punk (the victim) out to be the bully. The longer it goes on, the longer it plays with the victims mind. Punk knows that he is in the right, but feels like he has not just let himself but everyone else down as well, he feels “responsible” for the actions that have happened, and victims feel like this. And the reason is….. They never get an apology. The bully(ies) make the victim feel that he/she “brought everything on themselves” and the victim knows deep down that they didnt (and do all along), but the longer no apology is forthcoming, the more little trinkets of doubt come into their mind. With Heyman saying things like “I loved you” and stuff like that, this is quite fascinating as a study from unbelievably the world of wrestling. He is making Punk feel that he only did what he did out of love, that Punk “betrayed him”, that he loved him, all that. By Punk not getting his apology, everything is still up in limbo, there is still that doubt. He doesn’t have any doubt, but maybe the longer it goes on, he will. Wrestling doesn’t get that deep, but I’d be impressed if they did. It’s never the victims fault, but to the abuser, “the victim brings it on themselves”. The victim never brings on anything themselves, the abuser DECIDES to bully and hides bullshit mantra such as that and whatever else.

That’s the knee that took John Cena! That’s the knee that took Seth Rollins! That’s the knee that took Wade Barret! That’s the knee that took Randy Orton! That’s the knee that took Dean Ambrose! That’s the knee that took Seth Rollins!